This Just In

Prison guards suit up

Battle ready

By LANCE TAPLEY | March 14, 2007

CLOTHES OF WAR: An example Class A uniform at left, and an example battle dress uniform (BDU) at right.

Maine State Prison warden Jeffrey Merrill has decided to replace the prison’s traditional uniform for correctional officers. The prison guards will go from what is known as a Class A uniform, a police-style outfit, to the military style known as the battle dress uniform (BDU). In a February 28 memo to prison staff, he said he made the decision to save $45,000 in the budget, money that will be used to buy new automatic pistols to replace the officers’ revolvers. “Some staff are concerned about maintaining a professional appearance,” he writes. They are concerned about the image the BDU presents to prisoners — that the guards are going to battle. But Merrill urged officers to give the new look “a fair trial” for a year, and then he will re-evaluate.

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Topics: This Just In , Criminal Sentencing and Punishment, Prisons, Jeffrey Merrill

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ARTICLES BY LANCE TAPLEY

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The widow of Sheldon Weinstein, the Maine State Prison inmate who died in April several days after allegedly being beaten by inmates, has taken the first step toward filing a wrongful-death lawsuit against prison guards, Department of Corrections “policy-making personnel,” and prison medical-care providers.

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Representative James Schatz, a Blue Hill Democrat, has proposed legislation to tightly limit when prisoners can be kept in the solitary confinement of the 100-man Supermax unit of the Maine State Prison in Warren.

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This story has a bias. It’s in favor of human rights for all people.

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A heavily tattooed, self-described Satanist serving a life sentence for savagely murdering two people in Augusta in 1998 — his 16-year-old stepdaughter and his 87-year-old former landlady — inmate John L’Heureux, 39, is probably not the man Maine’s gay-rights groups would choose to represent their cause in the state prison, if they were inclined to choose anyone there.

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Vacillating between grit and despair — between aggressive lawsuits and suicide attempts — Deane Brown, the prisoner who in 2005 blew the whistle on the torture of mentally ill inmates at the Maine State Prison’s solitary-confinement “Supermax” unit, is struggling against prison conditions in Maryland, where he was exiled by the Baldacci administration.

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